HUSBAND TAKES PLEA IN ’87 DEATH OF WIFE
James O’Neil, 84, had always said it was suicide; he gets probation for manslaughter.
For 30 years, seven months and 22 days, James O’Neil carried the weight of a memory so ugly, even bystanders in a Palm Beach County courtroom on Friday gasped as a prosecutor read the facts of his case to a judge.
Although O’Neil had told police and anyone who would listen for decades that his first wife had committed suicide, the now 84-year-old Lake Worth man stood in court and accepted a 5-year probation sentence on a manslaughter charge after he admitted in open court what he’d told his daughter only 17 months ago:
Verna Packer O’Neil did not take her own life. After an argument over her drinking and the fact that she’d burned their dinner, the finger on the trigger of the gun that killed her was her husband’s.
“This was something that he wanted to get behind him,” O’Neil’s attorney, Michael Salnick, said of the plea agreement. “He has been all these years a law-abiding man, he has been a God-fearing man, and I think at his age he wanted to come in here and make sure that every negative chapter in his life is closed.”
O’Neil, according to arrest reports, told both his daughter and Palm Beach County sheriff’s detectives last year that the shooting was accidental. Verna O’Neil had grabbed the gun and was threatening to harm herself, he said, and as he wrestled the gun away from her it went off, killing her.
Circuit Judge Samantha Schosberg Feuer accepted the plea agreement between defense attorneys Michael and Greg Salnick and Assistant State Attorney Lauren Godden, sentencing O’Neil as part of the deal to serve the first two years of probation on house arrest.
Dressed in a suit and red tie, O’Neil smiled as he turned to walk out of the courtroom after Feuer sentenced him Friday, looking over at the dozen or so members of his church prayer group who had attended the hearing to support him.
In February 2017, O’Neil’s daughter, Sharon McGee, showed up in the lobby of the Palm Beach County Sheriff ’s Office and told detectives there that she believed her father had killed her mother. McGee said she was 28 at the time of her mother’s death, and even then she never believed her father’s claim that her mother had committed suicide.
McGee told investigators her suspicions were confirmed when she went to visit her father on Oct. 28, 2016 and he told her that he had shot her mother while trying to wrestle the gun away from her. Later that night, McGee said, she received the following text message from her father.
“I’m believing that you will sleep much better tonight. Love Dad,” he wrote.
In April, detectives visited O’Neil’s Lake Worth home, where he lives with his current wife, Doris. They told him that they were reopening an investigation into Verna O’Neil’s death. He eventually told them that he accidentally shot his wife, claiming he knew the .357 revolver that killed her had a hair trigger when he took it way from her but quickly adding that the shooting was an accident.
“James said he lied during his previous interviews because he was afraid he would get into trouble,” Detective Paige McCann wrote in a July arrest report.
Detectives reportedly reviewed the case for several months before ultimately deciding to arrest O’Neil.
On Friday, Michael Salnick said there were still many questions about whether the shooting was accidental and he would have had strong arguments had the case gone to trial. But he said O’Neil from the start had urged him to resolve the case.
With his atonement prescribed in courtroom Friday, O’Neil walked out to an uncertain future with his family.
Both his daughter and Verna O’Neil’s family had agreed to the plea deal, Salnick said, but not before O’Neil and his daughter talked about what happened with prosecutors and defense attorneys present.
“They’ve had a meeting and discussed it. They’ve hugged each other and they’ve tried to put it behind them,” he said. “I don’t know to what extent something like this can really be put behind someone, but they did have a meeting to resolve their differences.”